‘Don’t believe half the stories,’ Prozor said to me, as we looked out the window at the nearing spindle of Trevenza Reach. ‘And of the half that’s left, don’t believe half of them, neither. It’s just a place, that’s all. Ain’t the worst or best of worlds, and for every fortune it’s made, it’s taken two or three.’
‘They say it’s very old.’
She nodded sagely, like I was the fount of all wisdom.
‘Do they now.’
I soldiered on. I’d been reading up what I could, borrowing books and talking to the others. ‘It’s a spindleworld. That’s what they call it. It’s out here on a very strange orbit, not like any of the other worlds. It spends part of its orbit going through the main part of the Congregation, but a lot more out here, looping through the Empty, weeks or months away from anywhere else. And no one’s too sure how it ended up this way.’
‘But you’ve picked up a few theories.’
‘Some say it got knocked off its original orbit during one of the old wars, back in the early Occupations. Others say that it’s an artificial world, older even than the Sundering, and that they kept it on its old orbit even when all the rubble and junk got organised into the worlds of the Congregation ten million years ago. There’s others say it’s a ship, not a world, but it got stalled out here.’
‘Pretty odd ship, with no sails.’
‘It wasn’t like one of our ships. It was meant to go much further, out beyond the deep Empty, into the great, dark sea of the Swirly. But there was a mutiny, the crew getting the shivers at the thought of all that journey ahead of them, and it ended up drifting out here, forever outcast from the trade and companionship of the other worlds.’
‘Forever outcast from the trade and companionship of the other worlds,’ she said, mimicking me in a high, affected voice. ‘You really have been swallowin’ libraries.’
‘I just want to know, Prozor.’
‘Well, I’ll give a fourth theory for your hard-earned. It’s a ship, and it was meant to cross the Swirly, but this is it at the end of its voyage, not the start. It’s how one of the Occupations got started. Not ours, because Trevenza Reach was already there last time, and maybe the one before it – just different names, is all. But one of ’em, anyway, got started because a ship full of people stumbled on all these empty worlds and started fillin’ ’em up again, just like we did.’
‘Is that what you believe?’
‘No. Mostly I believe what I’m told to believe, and the rest is what I’ve figured out with my own two lamps and the grey between my ears. And Trevenza Reach ain’t all that old. Can’t be, all windows and glass like that. Nothin’ that twinkly lasts millions and millions of years, not without a bauble field around it. Truth is, it’s probably only a few Occupations old, maybe newer, and it’s damn lucky to have lasted as long as it has.’
I know a thing or two more now, enough to say that Prozor was right about the luck part. Spindleworlds aren’t common, and if ever there were more of them, most can’t have made it through to the present Occupation. Of those that did, there isn’t a pair of them that are alike. But they’ve all got the same form, which is like two cones joined together at their bases, with long, triangular windows running from the thickest part to the opposing ends. Spindleworlds don’t have swallowers in them, so they get their gravity by turning around. Because it isn’t the same at the narrow ends compared to the middle, coves can choose which bit suits them best. For the same reason it’s easier for ships to come and go from the ports at either end. That first time I saw Trevenza Reach, I couldn’t believe how small the ships looked, all swarming around like little tiny flies. They’d all hauled in their sails by then, as had we, creeping in on ions until at last a docking slot was available.
We were nearly set to leave when Jastrabarsk came to us. He sat us down opposite him in the Courtesan’s galley. ‘I have at least a week’s business here, maybe two, if we need more yardage than they can supply at short notice. I’ll aim to give you both fair warning before we cast away, but if you stray far from the port I can’t promise to get word to you in time.’
‘Will you be going anywhere near Mazarile?’ I asked.
‘No – we’ve a string of baubles to pop, once our yardage is settled. But you’ll find no lack of ships heading that way, or some near-enough place. I’m owed favours enough that I am sure I could arrange free passage for both of you.’
‘I’ll work my way,’ I said. ‘But thank you, anyway.’
‘I see you thought better of Meveraunce’s potions, Fura. I can’t fault you for that, but be prepared for some odd looks when you leave the dock.’
I shrugged. ‘Hasn’t anyone seen the glowy before?’
‘The glowy isn’t the odd thing. It’s that you don’t seem to care. The way you almost seem to welcome it, like a badge of honour.’ He produced a pair of small bags and set them on the galley table. ‘Your shares. I hope I’ve been honest.’
From the feel of my bag, there were six or seven quoins inside. Even if they were low-mark denominations – and I doubted that they were, for Jastrabarsk and Rackamore had held each other’s honour in equal regard – this was more money than I’d ever handled at once. I wondered about the etiquette of opening the drawstring to peer inside, but instead followed Prozor’s example and did no such thing.
‘Take care of that money. Prozor doesn’t need to be told, but Trevenza Reach isn’t well policed. Someone lifts that bag before you get to bank it with the Crawlies, you might as well have stayed at home.’
‘I’ll take care of her,’ Prozor said, stuffing the bag into an interior pocket. ‘Not that she can’t do it herself.’
‘There’s one other thing,’ Jastrabarsk said.
He fumbled a single quoin out of his pocket and onto the table. He just set it there for a few moments, not saying a word, giving us both time to clap our eyes on the piece and puzzle out its worth. It was the same size and thickness as any other, but from the dense criss-cross pattern of bars on its face, I knew it was one of the highest-value quoins I’d ever seen.
‘I thought we’d been paid,’ I said.
‘I can’t entice either of you to remain on my ship,’ he said, breaking his own silence when the quoin had made its point. ‘But I’d still like you to consider this offer. You could sail with any ship for a year, break a dozen baubles, and not earn this much money. It’s yours, for a simple price.’
‘And that’d be?’ Prozor asked.
‘Information. If one of you knows it, and speaks it first, then you can claim the quoin for yourself. If you want to split it, you can share the information.’
‘And what would this information be?’ I asked.
‘You crewed with Rackamore. You might not have been with him long, Fura, but you were his Bone Reader and he’d have been quick to let you into his confidences. As for you, Prozor, you sailed with him to many worlds and baubles. I know you know about the Fang.’
She didn’t answer him for a few seconds, and I certainly didn’t dare speak in her place.
‘The what?’
‘It’s a bauble. I know that much. But the name’s not an official one, and it doesn’t correspond to any of the baubles in our files. I also know – or so the rumour goes – that whatever Rackamore found there was enough to have him plotting to go back, when he could summon the nerve. Now, I wasn’t one to tread on a man’s toes when he was alive. The Fang was Rack’s business, not mine. But it’s different now. He won’t be going back, and if one of you doesn’t speak, the information stands every chance of dying with you.’ He picked up the quoin again, rolling it in his fingers just so we got a better look at it. ‘Ghostie stuff, that’s what I heard. Maybe it’s true, maybe it isn’t. You’d have to open it to know, wouldn’t you? But for that you’d need to know orbits, processionals, auguries – all the gen I don’t have.’
‘Then you’re out
of luck,’ Prozor said quietly. ‘I don’t know anything about it. Maybe you caught a rumour, that’s all. If Rack had found a score like that, don’t you think he’d have gone back?’
‘He might have been waiting for the right time, mightn’t he?’ Jastrabarsk shifted the boulder of his head to look at me now, and slid the quoin onto the table right before me. ‘So that’s all it ever was – a rumour?’
I looked at the quoin again. I could read the low-bar denominations easily enough, but the higher value ones were tricky, and you need to know about bases and so on to make sense of their arrangements of bars. Not that I’d ever needed to know the value of a hundred- or thousand-bar quoin: that was for bankers and rich coves to drool over. The criss-crossed bars of this one floated above a diminishing, descending lattice of golden and silver threads, like I was looking into the guts of something that went further down than the table it was sitting on. No one could make anything like that now, which was why quoins were impossible to forge.
‘If it was more than a rumour,’ I said, ‘I didn’t catch it. Not in all the conversations I ever had with Rack. I’m sorry, Captain. Nothing’d make me happier than to take that beauty off your hands.’
‘It was worth a try, I suppose,’ Jastrabarsk said, palming back the quoin and returning it to his pocket. ‘But perhaps it’s for the best, all things considered. We all want a prize we can retire on, don’t we? But some things are better off left in baubles, and if anything ever qualified for that, it’s the stuff the Ghosties left behind.’ He looked a bit disappointed, but only a little bit. ‘That was by means of a bonus, I need hardly add. You both have your share of the earnings from the bauble, and if the brokers pay us more than we expect, I’ll make sure you receive your dividends. Is there anything more you feel you are owed?’
‘After you rescued us, it’s us who’s in debt,’ I said. ‘But I’ve got one thing to ask, Captain. When we’ve docked at Trevenza Reach, I need to squawk a message back home. I know it’s expensive with the commercial senders, the Reach being so far out, and I wondered if you could see your way to helping me.’
‘A transmission back to Mazarile, you mean?’
I nodded humbly. ‘I wanted to put my father’s mind at ease, sir.’
‘Then let me be the one to put your mind at ease,’ Jastrabarsk answered. ‘I already signalled the worlds, once we had you. It’s common protocol in the case of a rescue – so common that I didn’t think to mention it to you until now. I can’t believe that word won’t have reached your father weeks ago.’
‘That’s very good news,’ I said.
‘If you’d like to make another short transmission, you’d of course be absolutely welcome to use the squawk.’
‘On balance,’ I said, ‘I reckon you’ve already saved me the bother.’
10
With the few belongings that we had to our names, Prozor and I moved through the colour and chaos of the docks. It was weightless at the spindle, or as near as it mattered, and this only added to the confusion. There were coves everywhere – not just crews, but quartermasters, brokers, customs officers, revenue enforcers, confidence tricksters, pickpockets, drunks, harlots, prospective employees, salespeople, dock workers, vendors, musicians, even animals and robots and one or two watchful aliens. The stove smoke hazed the lungstuff and with every breath you picked up the sharp, cheap tang of perfumed incense burners. Lightvine and neon advertising struggled to push through this pastel smear, fighting for the last ragged trace of our wits.
It would have been disorientating to come here directly from Mazarile, but after weeks in the dark bellies of ships, the assault to the senses felt like a brutal, calculated siege.
‘Hold onto those quoins,’ Prozor said.
‘Where are we going?’
‘There’s a good bar a league or two down the spindle. I know you’re itchy to be on your way, but you’ll need the right connections for that and there’s a man I know can help you. You still stuck on this notion of going after her?’
‘What would you do?’
‘In your shoes? Take that bag of quoins, hop a ship back to Mazarile – which won’t cost you half of your earnings – and then spend the rest of my life never once looking at the sky. Ain’t you anxious to see your father?’
‘When I’ve got reason to see him. Which won’t be until Adrana’s with me.’
Prozor shook her head. ‘I was hopin’ it was just a phase, all that talk about crossing orbits with Fura Ness. Not that I didn’t believe you at the time, but I was countin’ on you seeing sense by now. And Jastrabarsk’s right: you can’t go around with the glowy in you like it’s something you’ve earned.’
‘Why not? I did earn it, didn’t I?’
If there was some kind of immigration procedure, we ghosted through it without formality. No papers were checked, no questions were asked of us, no payment was demanded. Perhaps it was Prozor, her reputation pushing ahead of us like a ram. Or me, with the glow under my skin and a look in my eyes that challenged anyone to stand in my way. Slowly we fought our way through the thinning bustle to a quieter district of the docks, and then we were out into a warren of gaudy little alleys lined with shops and boutiques that all offered one disreputable service or another. Prozor knew her way, and we threaded this maze down the gentle decline of the spindle’s interior, our weight gradually increasing as we moved further and further from the port.
Natural light pushed into Trevenza Reach through the long tapering windows, but since we were further from the Old Sun it was dimmer than Mazarile’s day. To augment the effect, a garland of lights had been strung from one end of the spindle to another, along all ten leagues of that distance. The garland was made up of dozens of hot blue sparks, but there were many gaps where they had stopped working properly. Around the inside surface, where there were not already windows, streets, houses and taller buildings festered in a clash of grids and whorls, chaos and order balanced in some uneasy civic stalemate. No city on Mazarile was more than a league across, but the spindle could have swallowed Hadramaw and Incer dozens of times over.
‘Where does one bit end and another start?’
‘They don’t,’ Prozor said. ‘It’s all just one thing. There are districts and quarters, s’posedly. But no one can agree on ’em and it’d be pointless putting up signs.’
‘Which are the oldest parts?’
‘All and none of ’em. Place is like a wound. Keeps growing over itself, getting more scarry all the time, until one day it scabs off and starts all over again. Someone sells you a map you might as well read it through the wrong side of the paper, all the good it’ll do.’
‘I hope you know where to go. And this man you know – what’s he going to tell me?’
‘The same as me, to start with – that’d you’d be better off home. Once Quell’s got it into his noggin that you’re serious, he’ll find you passage to some world that isn’t too many months away. Auzar’s favourable now, so’s Gebuly or Kathromil. Once you’ve landed, you can take stock and see how the advice you got given on Trevenza wasn’t as bad as it looked.’
‘I know my mind,’ I said firmly.
‘Now you do. But once you’ve had time to reflect on how lucky you’ve been, you won’t be in such a hurry to see Bosa again.’
It would have taken us days to fight our way through the maze of streets, but by some consent the city had preserved several wider thoroughfares running parallel to the edges of the windows. These avenues were rambling, dusty, clotted with traffic, overhung by leaning shops and houses, criss-crossed by electricity and telegraph lines, draped with flags and banners, and spanned by ramshackle footbridges connecting the upper levels of one building to another. There were people everywhere, wearing every kind of fashion, and even the lowliest had a proud, hard look to them. A woman was washing clothing on the front step of her house. She eyed me while her jaws chewed on something with a
slow, methodical rhythm. There was judgement in her eyes, measuring me up in an instant. Prozor didn’t draw a second glance.
I was glad when we got onto one of the trams that worked their way up and down the thoroughfares, sparking under their cables. Prozor knew the numbers as if she’d been here yesterday.
‘Look at glow girl here,’ I caught a man say, as we stood pressed against the other passengers. ‘Been noshing on the vines, she has. Should’ve come to my place.’ He gave a dirty chuckle. ‘I’d have kept her handsomely fed.’
Prozor twisted her head around. ‘You got somethin’ to say to Fura, you can direct it my way as well. She saved my life.’
‘Didn’t mean nothing by it,’ the man said, rasping a hand across a face full of stubble.
As the tram rumbled on, I leaned in to her and whispered: ‘From what I remember I came pretty close to killing you. If you hadn’t come around by the time I moved you into lock, like I was planning . . .’
‘But you didn’t,’ Prozor said. ‘And you’ve got my gratitude – whether you want it or not.’
‘I’m glad we both made it,’ I said.
‘Not half as glad as I am.’
‘And I’m glad to be able to call you a friend. When we were first on the ship, I don’t think you liked us.’
‘Don’t mind admittin’ it, neither. Sits hard with us, watchin’ the captain fawn over his new favourites. But it was wrong of me, taking against you like I done.’
‘It’s over now, Prozor. We made it, and I’m grateful. We’re friends, aren’t we?’
Her tone got all stern, like she was correcting me over some life-and-death detail on a spacesuit or airlock.
‘No, Fura. We’re not. That word ain’t sufficient. We crewed together on a good ship, and that goes a thousand leagues deeper and further than any friendship.’
‘Thank you.’ I wondered if I ought to leave it at that, but something had been itching away at me for a while. Even though this wasn’t exactly a private place I knew I wouldn’t have many more chances to scratch it. ‘He’d have been proud of us, wouldn’t he?’
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